Intel Pentium III 1GHz

We mentioned, and you probably already know, that the i820 motherboard platform isn’t exactly the most popular platform in the market right now.  So what kind of support does the Pentium III have? 

Fortunately, VIA’s Apollo Pro 133A chipset is finally performing like it should and there are more than enough motherboards based on the chipset to provide you with a few good options when picking up a board. 

In particular, we used the ASUS P3V4X in our 133A tests with the 1GHz Pentium III simply because our Gigabyte 133A board failed to properly support the CPU without an updated BIOS that was, at the time of testing, unavailable.  If you do recall from our VIA Apollo Pro 133/133A Motherboard Roundup for February 2000, the ASUS P3V4X performed at the top of its class under all of the business and content creation tests, but it dropped down to last place in the gaming tests. 

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Apparently, there are issues with the P3V4X and the VIA AGP GART driver v4.00 that cause the gaming performance of the setup to drop considerably.  The only solution for now is to use v3.59 of the GART drivers from VIA, which completely corrects the performance issues.  We are still awaiting an explanation for this anomaly, which is present only with the P3V4X, from ASUS, and when we do receive an official statement, we will let you know. 

In order to illustrate the maximum performance of this setup, we used v3.59 of the GART drivers with the P3V4X test bed.

While the 1GHz Athlon couldn’t be overclocked too far because it is simply out of valid clock multipliers, the 1GHz Pentium III wouldn’t make it too far above 1000MHz because of cooling/yield issues.  Remember that Intel isn’t mass producing these 1GHz chips, so they can’t be expected to run at the usual 20 – 50% speed increase that we normally run the Pentium IIIs.